We Only Just Begun

They Knew About Prozac and Suicide

This post does not advertise suicide in any way. It is only posted to show that when the mind gets stuck on suicide, those that claim to want to help you, may only be after your money. If you find that the idea of suicide is becoming a constant companion in your life, then make sure that you seek help in replacing that mindset. Seek help from people who have overcome it themselves first, and those who seek to profit from it last. Be well. NBP

It’s yet another example of the widespread negligent actions committed by Big Pharma in the quest for profits. It’s not just Vioxx, Bextra or Celebrex. Now the truth is finally starting to come out on antidepressant drugs like Prozac.

And what is the truth? That drug makers like Eli Lilly not only knew their star drugs were more dangerous than alternatives, but that they actively sought to suppress the release of that information in order to protect profits.

What we are witnessing today is the beginning of the end of an era: the days of the Big Pharma con in which direct-to-consumer advertising pushed a drug industry to unprecedented levels of corporate greed.

Of course, Eli Lilly denies everything. It’s the same story talking to Merck. All these companies claim to be actually protecting the public health and working for the common good. Yet they continue to sell drugs with questionable safety records that are only now coming to light. And in none of these cases did these companies produce these documents on their own. In every case, they were “caught” by other people or organizations such as the British Medical Journal, which has gone public with these documents on Prozac.

If all this sounds familiar, it is: Big Tobacco used the same stonewalling efforts in its ongoing denials that cigarettes were harmful to health (or even addictive, if you can believe that). Today, Big Pharma looks a whole lot like Big Tobacco: corporate greed, massive cover-ups, and hundreds of thousands of people dying each year from the use of their products.

One more thing: there are still tens of thousands of brainwashed physicians willing to prescribe all these dangerous drugs to you. And if the brainwashing wasn’t enough, the kickbacks certainly are. Recommended reading: “On the Take” by Jerome Kassirer, M.D. If you want to know the truth about how drug companies literally bribe doctors into peddling their drugs, read this book. It’s authored by the former editor-in-chief of the British Medical Journal.

Finally, I want to mention that I warned people about the suicide risk of Prozac back in 1998. Back then, the idea that antidepressant drugs could cause suicides was considered ludicrous. It was fringe information, almost conspiracy theory stuff. Today, we’re learning it’s 100% true. And if you don’t believe me, just ask the parents of all the children killed at the Colombine high school massacre in Colorado: their killers were on antidepressant drugs.

Getting the picture yet?

Overview:

An internal document purportedly from Eli Lilly and Co. made public Monday appears to show that the drug maker had data more than 15 years ago showing that patients on its antidepressant Prozac were far more likely to attempt suicide and show hostility than were patients on other antidepressants and that the company attempted to minimize public awareness of the side effects.

The document was provided to CNN by the office of Rep. Maurice Hinchey, D-New York, who has called for tightening FDA regulations on drug safety. “The case demonstrates the need for Congress to mandate the complete disclosure of all clinical studies for FDA-approved drugs so that patients and their doctors, not the drug companies, decide whether the benefits of taking a certain medicine outweigh the risks,” he said.

The 1988 document indicated that 3.7 percent of patients attempted suicide while on the blockbuster drug, a rate more than 12 times that cited for any of four other commonly used antidepressants. The document, which cited clinical trials of 14,198 patients on fluoxetine — the generic name for Prozac — also stated that 2.3 percent of users suffered psychotic depression while on the drug, more than double the next-highest rate of patients using another antidepressant.

In the paper, titled “Activation and sedation in fluoxetine clinical trials,” the authors said that the drug may produce nervousness, anxiety, agitation or insomnia in 19 percent of patients, and sedation in 13 percent of patients.

Its editors said the documents had been reported missing from a 10-year-old murder case, and that they had sent them to the U.S. Food and Drug Administration for review.
A spokesman for Lilly said his company was expecting the release of the purported internal documents, but that he could not comment on them until he had seen them.